Dr Alejandra Albuerne

Lecturer

Bartlett School Env, Energy & Resources

Faculty of the Built Environment

Joined UCL

27th Mar 2017

Research summary

Alejandra is a structural engineer and construction
historian specialized in masonry buildings and heritage conservation. Alongside
engineering, Alejandra has a background in history of architecture and
construction, urban resilience, international development and participatory
design processes.

Alejandra’s engineering research covers traditional constructions and
heritage structures. She specialises in the mechanics of masonry constructions,
with a particular interest in their seismic behaviour. Her current research
looks at how traditional structures behave in earthquakes and finding
simplified modelling and analytical approaches that can efficiently estimate
the safety of a building. A crucial application of this work is disaster-prone
areas in the Global South, where domestic heritage is rich but where the
technical engineering resources available to look after it are limited.

At present Alejandra is engaged in the preservation of urban heritage in
Nepal, after the earthquakes of 2015. In this cross-disciplinary work,
engineering – necessary for the physical preservation of domestic heritage
buildings- is combined with other disciplines such as community engagement and
economics to support local communities to rebuild their towns while preserving
their tangible and intangible heritage.

Alejandra has previously worked on the research
project ‘Promoting Safer Building’ as part of UCL’s EPICentre.
The project explored how individuals, households and communities can be
supported to rebuild after a disaster in a manner that is safer, that is, so
that homes can resist hazards to avoid injury and death and to minimise
economic loss.

Teaching summary

Alejandra is the Course Director of the new MSc Data Science for Cultural Heritage programme. She is also joint Assistant
Course Director of the MSc on Sustainable Heritage at the UCL Institute for
Sustainable Heritage.

Biography

Alejandra was appointed
Lecturer in Sustainable Heritage at the UCL Institute for Sustainable
Heritage in September 2017, where she is joint Assistant Course Director of the
MSc in Sustainable Heritage.

Alejandra has worked in the
field of conservation of architecture for over 12 years, both in academia and
in industry. She has spent 8 of these years in industry working for specialised
structural engineering firms in London and Madrid, such as Alan Baxter and
Associates and Arup.

In academia Alejandra has
worked with Professor Santiago Huerta on the mechanics of masonry structures at
the School of Architecture of Madrid and in 2010 she obtained an EPSRC
scholarship to do a PhD at Oxford Unviersity studying the dynamics of masonry
vaulted structures.

Alejandra then spent two
years as Stipendiary Lecturer in Engineering Science at Oxford University and
in March 2017 she joined UCL as research associate in EPICentre, part of the
Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering within the Faculty
of Engineering Sciences.